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Do you wear gloves when working with power tools?

Generally, I do, but not often these days, and recent blisters and scrapes can attest to that. I do like wearing gloves with high-vibration tools, such as oscillating multi-tools and hammer drills.

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I should wear gloves more often, especially when handling materials. That would help with splinters, including a particularly large and nasty one a few weeks back, and small cuts.

But NEVER with stationary power tools that have moving or spinning parts.

Common convention seems to be that gloves are OK to be worn with handheld power tools, but NOT OK to be worn with stationary equipment.

Occasionally, a user manual or professional advice will instruct you otherwise, and should be followed.

With handheld power tools, you control the movements of the tool, often with two hands. With stationary equipment, you often control the movements of the work, tool, or positioning devices, and are exposed to fast-spinning parts.

The danger of wearing gloves with stationary equipment is that they can snag and wrap around a spinning bit, blade, or work. Should that happen, your hand – or worse – will be pulled into the danger zone, leading to bodily harm or even death.

Think of all the table saw accidents. Nobody thinks or believes they’ll suffer an avoidable or accidental injury, until they do.

So with equipment such as table saws, drill presses, lathes, bandsaws, and other such tools, gloves should not be worn, unless a professional authority instructs you otherwise.

In some cases nitrile gloves might be acceptable, because they’re tight-fitting when properly sized, but they can’t be relied on to break if caught.

I’ve made “I don’t really need to wear that for this quick task” decisions in the past few months, and a deep cut by my achilles (I wore shoes for basement flood cleanup instead of boots), blister on my left hand (no gloves when using the hedge trimmer and rake for 4 hours), and various small cuts and scrapes convinced me not to take any unnecessary chances.

I plan to wear gloves more often for material handling and assembly work, while taking them off when working with or near fast-spinning machinery.

All this is my opinion – keep in mind that I’m not a safety authority, and that you should follow the advice of user manuals, OSHA, or other such safety authorities.

OSHA PPE Booklet (PDF) – this literature offers guidance on glove selection and use, as well as other personal protective equipment.

The common advice seems to be that gloves, loose-fitting clothes, jewelry, and unsecured long hair can increase the risk of accidental injury.

So, if your hands will potentially be exposed to fast-moving parts of any kind, take precautions as indicated in the equipment user manual, or other professional advisory authority.

A lot of this might come across as obvious, but it’s only obvious once you think about it, or read guidance in a user manual or similar. I regularly see forum questions asking whether gloves can be used around power tools or not.

My self-guidance is this: if I wear gloves, is there any way for them to entangle my hands in the equipment? If the answer is yes, I don’t wear gloves. If for whatever reason I do need to wear gloves, I build or employ guarding to block access.

I don’t wear gloves with handheld power tools as much as I used to – and should – and am working on that.

38 Comments

Combination of msha and the mines’ further decision making requires I wear gloves while working on site, with the exception of when my task requires hand dexterity such as when I’m wiring crap or manipulating small parts. Which is fairly often as I’m an electrician. I’ve found my sweet spot with Fastenal’s 3×2 framer gloves which leave my thumb, index, and middle finger tips exposed. Seems to meet the standard, good work glove, and I don’t find myself donning and doffing gloves all day.

Definitely not when using my table saw or bandsaw etc. I don’t live in a cold climate so don’t really need gloves for warmth but I do have a couple of pairs for when I’m dismantling stuff or dragging items around.

I have a buddy at work who lost part of his finger a few months ago to a table saw because he had a glove on and the blade caught the glove and pulled his hand in. Could have been a lot worse. But now he can just give you 4 1/2!

It depends. Most recently I’ve worn any with hand held power tools was with a reciprocating saw. Friend and I took turns and I was the only one to wear gloves. As a result I also was spared the blisters and discomfort of the heat put off from the tool.

Definitely prefer to wear them when doing larger material handling because then I can focus more on the bulk task and less on tearing up my skin while trying to find the perfect spot to hold some rough material. For finer materials/scenarios I probably would’t because I would then favor the dexterity.

I follow pretty much the same rules.
Another good one is to not wear a hat around stationary tools. It’s really easy to have it fall off, reach out to grab it by instinct, and put your hand into the moving parts.

I seldom do any single tool centric task for very long and consequently have various gloves lying about that are seldom used.
That said I try to wear gloves moving lumber, panels and almost always with sheet metal.
Good discussion Stuart. And I wasn’t “forced” to consider a new tool or fitting.

Warm climate comments? No gloves in winter ? Outside? 20F or -10 ? All framers I know where gloves all winter using all tools… especially holding steel framing guns……safe ,maybe not but you can’t grab frozen stock barehanded for long..or hold a gun……. caution is taken but seen an injury yet except slipping and falling down.
Summer time is when injuries happen, with tool in hand and Brain already at beach…..

I buy cheap work gloves from Sierra Trading Post. I wear them for just about everything. I keep my hands far enough away from stationary equipment like my bench grinders, table saw and 12″ sander. Use push sticks, pliers and wrenches to handle material.

How fast do people burn through gloves? I usually get a month or two out of anything…leather… synthetic… doesn’t matter cheap or expensive.

This is probably self-evident, but I wear gloves whenever it is “more safe” to do so. For example, I use gloves when I am using my metal abrasive chop saw, I will wear gloves. Same with most hand-held tools such as a grinder or drill when using them on metal. Way too many hot bits. However, I do not wear gloves when using my meal cutting bandsaw or when using a drill on wood.

I recently bought a pair of ‘fingerless’ work gloves — covering only wrist, palm, and first joint of all five fingers, leaving last two joints exposed — because I was building a fence and was constantly alternating between material handling (fear of abrasion or splinters from redwood pickets) and drill/driving (where I wanted to be able to easily pick up and hold deck screws). So glad I did, and made the project much so much easier.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve started using them when riding my bike. Good protection for palms against handlebars, while still allowing my fingers to feel the brakes levers.

I’ve got some winter fingerless gloves for the obvious reasons of small parts outside when it’s cold. I wasn’t really sure when buying them that they’d make a lot of diff (thinking my fingers were going to get cold anyway), but the first time I used them was an epiphany.

Covering the meat of my hands really did save a lot of heat and made work a lot more comfortable & less frustrating.

After that, in even colder weather, I got another/thicker pair with a “mitten flap” to pull back over my exposed digits. This worked great, too – until I had to dig truck keys out of my pants pocket – and I keep wearing them…

I only wear my work gloves when the material I’m working with is hard to grip, or splinters/gets messy easily. This includes just moving things, like when my Dad moved apartments. Work Gloves went on.

When working with stationary equipment, I’m usually VERY small-scale, so it’s either bare-hands, or Nitrile Gloves, not Work Gloves.

I’m some weird genetic hybrid of races where calluses just don’t form. No matter how many hours I spend working with my hands, they just keep soft. So, the consequences of this mean I do get cuts and blisters very easily. But, I’m so used to it at this point, that I only use Gloves when my hands will get dirty, truly damaged, or cold in the winter. Otherwise, there’s nothing I can do to stop my hands from getting injured anyways, so I might as well just let it happen. If it helps my grip on the work, or stops me from losing a finger, great. Beyond that, it’s just overkill for me.

I don’t work with really large machinery, but if I did, I think my Nitrile gloves would be the most I’d feel safe having on my hands, to keep them clean. Beyond that, I wouldn’t trust a loose glove, or piece of clothing anywhere near a machine. Safety standards be damned, I just wouldn’t trust it.

The health and safety dictators over here will tell you that gloves are required at all times outside an office environment, a few years ago I had a visitor giving a good impression of preparing to faint because I was going out in to our yard without wearing gloves. All glaziers I know do not wear gloves when handling glass because they believe it leads to over confidence. I used to be part of the “real men don’t wear gloves” brigade (before I joined the lunch is for wimps industry) however I now wear them where it makes sense e.g. reciprocating saws, angle grinders, metal cutting tools but not when using a drill driver in wood. For handling any kind of heavy materials these days I wear orange Kong gloves. When I had my first metalwork lesson at school my father made me wear what is called a boiler suit in the UK which is designed to be close fitting without being restrictive and is therefore ideal in a workshop environment. I have a modern version which has a hood in the back of my car for emergencies. Some firms I know do not permit the wearing of rings including wedding rings when operating certain machines.

A bit of a trick question – since the power tool itself may not represent the hazard the requires hand protection. But as others have said – common sense suggests using gloves when you need to grip onto something that poses a hazard when using a power tool. That might be something that is hot or cold, sharp or abrasive etc.
You can look up OSHA rules.

I think that I tended to use gloves when I was doing demolition sorts of work.
I’d also use things like nitrile gloves in handling solvents, pain stripper etc.
My wife like nitrile gloves in the garden – but might add an over glove when doing tasks akin to gardening demolition.
We’d supply utility gloves to the crews – and I’d see them in use on demolition work – and again in outdoor wintertime work.
We’d put a wood carving glove on the scouts – when doing wood carving merit badge – and give them utility gloves when they were working on outdoor or other projects where abrasions and cuts were likely. Generally scouts did not use power tools.

Cut resistant gloves (once mostly for butchers) are now easier to find:

While not to my knowledge marketed to butchers in the UK we adopted these early on when working for certain clients who owned estates of public housing or projects as they are called in your country. The reason was that any time your hands were going somewhere you did not have complete sight of you wore the gloves. We also supplied the elbow length variant, one operative decided not to wear his when clearing a refuse chute and his arms were showered with used hypodermic needles. He had to have a number of tests for HIV, etc. Doing work in that environment did generate some unusual health and safety issues.

That sounds logical. The cut resistant fibers (Kevlar or something else) are still woven – so you would think that a needle stick through the weave would still be possible. Some extraction gloves say that they a “puncture resistant” – I’ve not seen ones that claim to be puncture proof.

We worked on the basis that they were the best option available. The hospital where our operative was treated seem convinced the gloves would have prevented his injuries, well better than bare skin anyway.

We did lots of old houses and demolition of walls were sometimes a hazard from old razor blades. Back in the 1950’s – some genius designer of “medicine cabinets” decided that a slot in the interior to allow folks to drop twin-edge safety razor blades into the wall would be a good idea. Gravity and their thinness – allowed the old rusty – but still sharp – blades to find their way down the wall and catch in a haphazard pattern. We worked on an apartment building – where there were piles of them down in the basement – possibly their migration aided by building shaking by subway trains rattling nearby.

Once I was wearing somewhat loose gloves using a circular saw when I realized that part of the glove from my hand on the secondary handle was brushing up against the inside diameter of the blade. It was a Makita blade with some triangular holes in it. Needless to say, it scared the crap out of me. Since then I have not worn gloves while using any sort of rotating saw, stationary or not.

My dad taught me never to wear gloves when using power tools, not just when using a lathe, but any power tool. The top layer of my skin peels away when exposed to oil, so I use a barrier cream instead of nitrile gloves. I still have all 10 fingers after 45 years! The thing that bothers me is I routinely see people using angle grinders while wearing gloves. Is this the one exception? I bet it would hurt to get a finger ground off, maybe with a cutting wheel.

Years ago, Doing plumbing, a master plumber was wearing gloves while using a holehawg with a holesaw bit in wood. Ś He wore the gloves to handle the hot holesaw. The glove got caught on the Chuck or extension bit and twisted up his fingers and hand. I believe he didn’t break bones, just had significant soft tissue damage and many months of recovery before he could use his hand for work again, or much else.
Using a sewer snake or rodder requires strong consideration of gloves (usually leather or studded) and care taken with clothing and body position. Some modern ones bypass some of the danger. As gross as it seems I’ve talked to some folks, mostly oldtimers, who didn’t wear gloves while snaking due to the danger. I usually wear leather over nitrile.

I rarely wear gloves for any kind of power tool. The exception is when I need to do a lot of sanding with an oscillating hand sander. My hands will go numb and the gloves help some, also I got the lowest vibration sander I could find. I wear leather gloves that are pretty padded (Bionic) at the joints. Never thought about using it with the multi tool, but I may do that, too. I wear them a lot when carrying rough lumber, or other heavy items, just to get a better grip. The Bionic gloves are expensive, but it’s diy or hobbyist work, so I don’t go through them that fast.

I’ve seen people use gloves to get a better grip at a planer or a table saw, and this makes me cringe. If you need a better grip get the right push sticks or blocks. Or maybe to prevent splinters. Then get a good magnifying glass and pair of tweezers.

Way back when in “field service” the hard and fast rule was “nothing on hands or wrists – no watches, bracelets, rings – and no sleeves below the elbow when within arm’s length of any piece of equipment connected to power.” The women complained because it also applied to fingernails that extended past the fingertip.

Maybe when I’m doing hard labor work such as using an axe and such. But otherwise I just don’t use gloves. Previous issues and results from others that used gloves at work convinced me not to use work gloves. Now if my hands are in a bucket of carb cleaner like back in the day, yes. Machines, no.

This is a tricky subject when I train students on power tool safety. I point out that PPE stands for PERSONAL Protective Equipment, and when they have a choice to use it or not, that choice is up to them. It’s my job to explain the risks and hazards, and to help them learn to make these decisions with critical thinking on their own.

When I’m working with wood and some metals, I know that my skin will react badly to the finer particulates. That’s a 100% likelihood of a minor (yet annoying and persistent) type of “injury” (for lack of a better term) if I’m not wearing gloves of some type. On the other hand, there is a smaller likelihood of a much more significant injury, having my hand or arm pulled into the tool. So I choose gloves (or not) depending on the tool, the particular operation on that tool, the material/workpiece, and a bunch of other variables. After the binary “gloves or no gloves” decision tree, there remains the option for several types of glove (leather, woven mechanics’ glove, nitrile, latex, etc) to suit the occasion.